keywords: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins' words highlight how difficult it is for poets or lesser human beings to focus consistently on the particularity of each human being, let alone of each being in the world. Yet this is a necessary condition for recognising the claim that each person and the world make on us. It is no wonder that we sometimes falter in our commitment.

We share a love of poetry, having come to Gerard Manley Hopkins from opposite directions, her from religious ecstasy, me from the dark sonnets. In the 1980s we met, in a shelter for Aboriginal women in Collingwood. My next memory? Ursula introducing me to the granddaughter of Kelly's sweetheart, an old woman dying in a Melbourne hospital.

If poetry is the pulse of our cultural life, so too can it be seen as the pulse of our public decisions. Our poetry loving Minister for the Environment may find wisdom in the words of some of his favourite poets when it comes to decisions about the Murray Darling basin, Tarkine wilderness and Great Barrier Reef.

In 2001, science broadcaster Robyn Williams wrote a novel inspired by Orwell's 1984, but set in 2007. It suggests that change is occurring with exponential speed, and that our opportunities for altering course are dwindling numerically, shrinking in size and diluting in quality.